The proliferation of wine bars in America is a great thing. It has spread the knowledge about vino so that laypeople have expanded their comfort zone well beyond the usual suspects of Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Malbec. Instead, they are as likely to look at the list as a chance to engage in oenological exploration. The wine bar effect has also spread to restaurants where ambitious sommeliers create lists to challenge the complacent.

Unfortunately complacency hasn’t been banned, it still exists in the cheese list of most wine bars and restaurants. The list will typically rattle off a few often inscrutable names (Challerhocker, Fricalin, Landaff, for instance, all wonderful cheeses but mostly known to a small percentage of the cheese cognoscenti), and they’ll explain these cheeses in two words “raw cow.” That doesn’t do much, even if you know that raw in this context means made from unpasteurized milk. Here are a few other “raw cow” cheeses: many Gruyeres, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and quite a few clothbound cheddars; they don’t taste remotely alike. Raw cow is an accurate way to describing their animal of origin and whether or not pregnant women should eat them. It doesn’t do much else.

It certainly doesn’t liberate laypeople from a comparable comfort zone in cheese, which might consist of Manchego, Triple Cream (yes, a category but rarely do people approach my counter and ask for Brillat Savarin), and Gruyere. It’s not necessarily that wine bars have some sort of responsibility to the cheese demi-monde to handle their products better; they don’t. But they’d sell a whole lot more cheese if they made a fraction of the effort with their cheese that they make with the wine, and it would give them a competitive advantage over the wine bar down the block.

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About jmartin437

I've worked in and around the world of high end cheese for 27 years. I've been everything from a department manager who hired and fired and trained staffs to a weekend warrior who shows up ties on an apron the middle of a rush and talks to customers and cleans up the place. I enjoy it all, and I especially like my current situation conducting informal seminars about cheese at area bars and in class at the 92nd St. Y. The current schedule is always up at thejoyofcheese.blogspot.com. In addition I conduct private events that are perfect to lead off birthday parties for foodies and sommeliers and also they make great entertainment for corporate team building events and associates meetings at law firms.
In addition, I've been a freelance journalist for 27 years. Currently my profiles of leading musicians and filmmakers appear in the Wall Street Journal and www.theroot.com. I also wrote about sports for the Root, and for five loooong years, which included the entirety of the Isiah Thomas Knicks era, I wrote about the NBA for the New York Sun. I enjoyed writing about basketball so much that I now do it here at rotations for free.

2 Responses to My “Raw Cow” Problem

Thank you for this post. I have seen abysmal cheese lists in some good wine bars. It is just sad, because cheese offers the same variety as wine does, and what wine bar would simply write “red” or “white” behind a wine, it is as unhelpful as “raw cow”…

It’s a general problem I have with many wine/food lists. Wine lists will (sometimes) include descriptions of the wines, menus will have descriptions of the disches, cheeses are typically listed as “cheese” or, as you mention, simply by their names – no description nor region or even country!